Shattered Kingdoms

I didn't suggest that a sorc should have more than one. I suggested that he/she make themselves more competent by being able to hold armor, spell ward, mirror image, and shield and simultaneously be able to use spells like acid blast and color spray. As of right now, it's incredibly easy to charm players and being charmed is the pinnacle of FML. It's also the best chance a sorc has against any melee player that can eat through a charm while ignoring the puny damage output from spells.

If you want a charm+buff, forget about a damage spell. Want to sleep while holding charm person? Better drop everything else.

Only the crappiest races for sorcs can't hold charm while sleeping.

Sorcs got a nerf with the stance changes and the concentration changes, but they gained a lot with impairment as well. A sorc will easily annihilate a melee PC with bad enchantments, and will have to get lucky to kill a melee PC one on one who is ready for the attack and also well enchanted. Since sorcs already don't have to risk to kill melee players unless they're going against rogues or swashies, they're fine. Sorcs are also very good when coupled with other players as well, and can turn the tide of a high-end battle just through dispel and/or acid blast alone.

Smurf is an idiot who likes to spam die, put no effort into what he's doing, not rp at all, and expect to be able to win whenever he wants.

Charm person is OP'd as it is. Any half-decent player will have all the buffs they want and only be concentrating on their charm spell.

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I agree with ardith. After playing multiple spell casters, I've noticed that the enchant system heavily favors melee. They can wear heavy armor which protects them naturally from melee strikes, as it should, but at the same time you can enchant the fire out of your armor to the point to where you're nigh invincible. When spells like lightning bolt and other damage spells that take time to cast are barely doing 4-10% to a warrior, you have a problem. It takes a spell caster anywhere from 10-20 rounds to down a well enchanted warrior class. To do the same to say a priest or sorc or warlock, then it takes the warrior 2-4 rounds total to down them in melee combat.

You can augment melee strike damage. Frenzy, giant strength, haste, all of these stack. With sanc, shield and other such defensive spells that can reduce spell damage on top of MP, reflex / fort, you see this discrepancy only grow. Casters have no way to mitigate melee damage. Once they're in combat, they 99% of the time will have to flee. This gap only grows wider if the warriors have heal vials and ways to heal themselves.

The only reason Ealuriel was so successful (And no offense to Syn here, she's still a good player) was that she heavily abused wands and such. When you have OP acid blast / cone of cold wands, cast time no longer plays a part and you can essentially spam these GM spells much like a melee can achieve 4-5 hits per round. It's only in this situation where magic is actually on even footing with melee. The real question though is how do you buff casters, especially sorcs / necros who already have monstrous melee capabilities without making them even stronger? You almost have to nerf melee and charms in general for it to work.

Anyways, back on topic. Charm person doesn't need fixed. It's really fine as it is. The only reason it's so limiting is because people way back when refused to RP being charmed. They would constantly rest, sit, etc and the moment the master slipped up and left the room, they'd flee. Or when you could send tells they'd have their buddies come rescue them. No one really played it correctly as they should. That's why we have it in it's current state.

D has said time and time again that PC's and NPC's really shouldn't be any different (Though there are still some differences, such as not being able to immediately junk a pc's corpse without the butcher command). Most of the people who want charm to not affect PC's are the people who can't have their ego harmed by losing. Does it suck to get charmed? It does when the charmer won't RP with you at all. That's also a cursable offense as well. In short, if you just want to fix charm person, it's called enchanting your armor. If you raise your character's wisdom or stack that enchantment known as willpower, you won't be charmed all that much. It's even more effective now that charm no longer factors in the caster's charisma.

FYI, acid blast from a wand isn't GM.

In addition, MP enchantments or not, if you repeatedly cast any warlock spell at an opponent they're not going to dodge for long, because every spell impairs their reflex. Cone of cold on a group will do some crazy damage after a few rounds.

Also, one of your points was "How come caster classes can't last as long in melee than melee classes" To which I am genuinely confused. You also mentioned that casters have to flee almost as soon as they're in combat.


I think that my advice to you would be to speed up. If you take 2 rounds to start casting a spell, sure, you're going to have to flee, big surprise. But, a caster can still put up a fight and have a chance of landing a kill on any melee class, easy, except for maybe solo priests, or if you're fighting against a hammer character and you don't have access to dispel.

smurf, look at who is saying this to you and understand that you have a problem.

My point wasn't that caster classes can't last as long in melee as melee classes. That shouldn't be happening and is working as intended. The problem is that melee users dish out so much damage that elementals and charmees typically are dead in a couple of rounds before the caster can get any serious damage off to the melee user. There are more spells that augment melee damage and enchants + defensive spells mitigate more spell damage than they do melee damage.

What I mean is look at some logs to where people were taking 4% from BoG. Logs where Magma Spray (Which is supposed to be one of the strongest spells) only doing 5-15% dmg to a person. In situations like that, a caster has no chance to kill the melee user. Enchantments really benefit melee more than they do casters. It's odd that, to be on par, the majority of damage from a sorc comes from two barb charms with weapons buffed to hell and back. The actual sorc doesn't really do much but dispel and other things.

You haven't "Kin"ed a thread in a while but I think you're close to doing it here. For all you wrote, I'm not convinced that you're accurately portraying sorcs. Acid blast does nasty damage, petrification (if you can get it off a couple times) works with impairment, dispel is savage, and there's really nothing stopping you from having a GM barb with armor and an enchanted weapon at all times. You're also in the 3rd row against a melee unless you're doing it wrong. I'd rather not go on, but how is it that (as currently in game, in a 1v1 pk) you're at a disadvantage against melee?

Anyways, I think sorcs are pretty damn good in groups without charms already. In fact, between the stress on concentration/me and the absolute horror that is a charm turning on you, I prefer not to bring them into group pk, and I think Impairment has gone a long way to making reflex/wp/fort spells more effective. A hard cap on enchants coupled with a redesign of 1-shot KOs might really do the trick.

Acid blast is actually pretty awful. No one in the game legitimately dies to spell damage anymore; most kills are bagged with one of the following:

- melee damage
- save-or-die spells (charm person falls under this)
- recited scrolls (usually with instant-kill spells)

This is probably more of an artifact of how damage-soaking works at the moment over anything else...